Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 662 posts

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#441

Post by CalRobert »

elevation wrote: post #423
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who: * lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job, * failed to grok requirements through the language barrier, * were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base, * committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim, * and could not be held liable b…

For a counterpoint, I’ve worked with many great engineers in Latin America who are smart, capable, and in the same time zones as the US

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#442

Post by anon191928 »

jameslk wrote: post #347
jimmont wrote: post #327

Organizations are choosing to eliminate workers rather than amplify them with AI because they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity. That's the rent extraction model consuming its own productive infrastructure. The Stanford study documents organizations systematically choosing inferior economic strategies because their rent-extraction frameworks cannot conc…

> So what comes next? When you don’t need as many people because of automation, you also don’t need them to fight your wars. You use drones and other automated weapons. You don’t need things like democracy because that was to prevent people from turning to revolution, and that problem has been solved with automated weapons. So then you don’t really need as many people anymore, so you stop providing the expensive heal…

palantir and anduril :))

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#443

Post by Cthulhu_ »

elevation wrote: post #423
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who: * lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job, * failed to grok requirements through the language barrier, * were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base, * committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim, * and could not be held liable b…

I've worked alongside (but never with) offshore developers, often from the big consultancy companies. One thing they tend to do is place one competent developer and a dozen less-so, so that the work gets done by the one but they get paid for a dozen people.

But I also believe the managers hiring offshore employees are fully aware of this. If they aren't then they're not very good managers and/or have no idea what they're doing.

The offshore people mainly work on SAP and legacy systems though; it turns out it's very hard to find willing or competent people in Europe that actually want to work on / with SAP. However, foreign workers have less qualms about learning stuff like that, since the money is really good.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#444

Post by malthaus »

elevation wrote: post #423
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

As a US-based developer I do not feel threatened by the "cheap" offshore developers I encounter. I've repeatedly been hired to clean up after offshore developers who: * lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job, * failed to grok requirements through the language barrier, * were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base, * committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim, * and could not be held liable b…

you're delusional. of course if you take the cheapest possible offshore workers you get terrible results when compared to an experienced engineer in a developed country.

but it's a bit like ikea: if you buy their cheapest stuff it will fall apart after a few months but their "expensive" lines are still far cheaper than the competition but the same quality.

you might think you're a solid mahogany table but at the end of the day you're probably the same table as being sold at ikea, just more expensive

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#445

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jedberg wrote: post #360
raincole wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but: What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task. But if you give them a nebulous proble…

While on the one side I think you have a point, on the other there's different dynamics in place as well; you're comparing offshore workers to internal employees. An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company.

That is, an external worker (and I'm a consultant, I know) gets paid per hour, if the company goes under for whatever reason they just move on to the next assignment, while an internal employee leans more on their job.

Anyway that's just a theory. I'm a "consultant" which is just a fancy word for a temp / hired hand, and I'm somewhere in the middle in that I will think along with the company and propose improvements, but at the same time have lower risk and much less attachment to the companies I work for.

I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#446

Post by muldvarp »

anthem2025 wrote: post #109
muldvarp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you get that "sometimes" down to "rarely" and then "very rarely" you can replace a lot of expensive and inflexible humans with cheap and infinitely flexible computers. That's pretty much what we're experiencing currently. Two years ago code generation by LLMs was usually horrible. Now it's generally pretty good.

Lots of technology is cool if you get to just say “if we get rid of the limitations” while offering no practical way to do so. It’s still horrible btw.

Hallucination has significantly decreased in the last two years.

I'm not saying that LLMs will positively replace all programmers next year, I'm saying that there is a lot of uncertainty and that I don't want that uncertainty in my career.

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#447

Post by sensanaty »

raincole wrote: post #297
fibers wrote: post #8

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if th…

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

I'm one of those offshore people that live in a cheaper place and works remotely for a US co.

The majority of people in the company are still in the US, and even for the East coast, the timezones are just annoying to work around sometimes. Either I need to do late days, or they have to do uber early mornings/SUPER late days, don't even get me started on West coast where the hours basically never match. And I'm in the closest timezone I can be for the US.

And there's also a cultural aspect to it. I simply work differently to how the US bosses expect, because my employer has to respect worker's rights if they want to hire people in the EU unless they hire them as contractors (they still have many protections in that case though). I clock off at exactly 17:00, I never answer messages outside working hours, I don't do overtime or anything resembling it etc. And yes, they don't pay me the same as I would in the US, but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands. I get paid less relatively, but from what I can tell other that the people getting paid obscene amounts, my quality of life is higher than most of my US counterparts

I've noticed my US colleagues are much more willing to waste away their lives for their employer as well, even if there's no real expectation for them to do so, and the business obviously prefers those kind of employees over the ones like me.

So there's still plenty of reasons to keep hiring US-based devs, from cultural to logistical. Maybe you guys should work on getting some actual worker protections first, though...

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#448

Post by deadbabe »

raincole wrote: post #297
fibers wrote: post #8

The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if th…

It's amusing to see programmers in the US promoting remote work. Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

Oh look, another person who thinks engineers are commodities, especially in a field as loosely defined and unregulated as software engineering.

They always ask “if a job can be done remote why not just hire a foreigner in a cheap place?” and never ask “if the foreigner was so good as the American engineer why wouldn’t they be getting paid the same as the American?”

It’s like they think companies are dumb and there is some undiscovered engineering arbitrage opportunity waiting to be tapped that will end the high 6 figure salaries of American software engineers forever.

And yet, since the 90s, software engineer salaries only go up. Millions of Indians flood the foreign markets, but American tech salaries only go up. Covid hits and everyone goes remote, but the salaries only go up. They always go up. American tech holds a supremacy over the world that you will likely not see the end of in your lifetime. There is so much money, so much risk taking, so much drive to dominate, other countries are generations behind.

But hey keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe you’ll save a couple bucks while your competitors gobble up the market with far better engineering talent. Not “equivalent” talent: better talent..

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#449

Post by jedberg »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #445
jedberg wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place? I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but: What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task. But if you give them a nebulous proble…

While on the one side I think you have a point, on the other there's different dynamics in place as well; you're comparing offshore workers to internal employees. An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company. That is, an external worker (and I'm a consultant, I know) gets paid per hour, if the company goes under for whatever reason they just move on to the…

> An offshore worker gets hired to do a job for another company, an internal employee is part of the company.

I've experienced both. Working with offshore employees and full time employees who happened to be in foreign countries. It was a similar experience with both, the exception being the ones that had previously lived and worked in the US.

> I don't think it's cultural per se. As an extreme example, the CEOs of Google and Microsoft were both born and raised in India.

Sundar Pichai moved to the US when he was in college. His entire working career and a bunch of his schooling was in the US.

Satya Nadella did the same.

As I said in my original reply, the ones who are more entrepreneurial or successful tend to move to the US (or at least used to).

Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

#450

Post by solatic »

root_axis wrote: post #356

Are people really replacing customer service agents with LLMs? It doesn't seem practical. Customer service handles all the things that customers aren't trusted to manage on their own with a self-service portal - that's the whole point of having a trusted human involved at all. Giving those tasks to LLMs won't work because the customer can just prompt inject their way to whatever toolcalls correspond to their desired…

I had a home internet outage recently and needed the ISP to send a tech out.

Five years ago, you'd wait on-hold to talk to a human being with a script. "Is the light on your modem red?" "Try turning your modem on and off again." "OK let's schedule a technician for you."

Today I get a pre-LLM chatbot, with the same script, no waiting on-hold, available 24/7, with pictures and guides. It's somewhat faster because no human has to read the script over the phone, the words just appear instantaneously. Getting through the script tree to the outcome I want is an easy and obvious path.

The vast, vast majority of Tier 1 support is not something where the customer service agent has any agency. They have a script. Taking humans out of the loop here is an improvement.

Post reply on HN